This doesn't really have anything to do with ditching classes, unless you feel the departure from the trinity is the death of classes as we know them. I simply wanted to start a discussion on how Guild Wars 2 design philosophy could be applied to future Essentials material, maybe an evolution of class roles and variants of classes.
So -refining- the roles rather than removing them. Okay....
I mean their ideas on distilling what it means to be a healer alone holds exciting prospects for future clerics, maybe even class roles in general. Instead of spamming heals, which is just like spending turn after turn on healing powers, deprives a player of their freedom of choice, or at least makes for a static existence.
Two healing powers per encounter makes heals pretty unspammable in D&D 4th edition. The only way you'll end up with a character that -can- spam healing power is if you make a character specifically to do just that. The Leader role has never been about 'spamming heals', and in fact, that's a single build of a single class... and one that isn't even in the main book.
I know WotC tried to counteract this by making healing word a minor, and by giving heals some combat and ranged damage, but I'd like to see them take it further. Heck, the Warlord class also felt like an attempt to pull away from the classic healing trope, to try and redefine what it meant to support and buff.
Runepriest? Artificers? Ardents? All three of these are based around the idea of defense-through-offense.
Arenanet is looking to expand the notion of healing from reactive to proactive, and do away with most of the classical 'heal 1d6+4 hp'. They seem more of a mind preventing or diverting attacks and damage, or countering them entirely with powers.
Imagine a cleric without healing word, who only has 1 daily classic heal. How is he going to lead and support a group? Well, pretend now he's an evolution of the Essential's Storm Warpriest, but instead of the dreaded power points or rigid class features, he can use his actual powers to effect terrain or counteract certain attacks. Maybe a rain power dilutes ongoing acid damage, or douses a burning area.
Or he's a runepriest that has a minor heal but that minor heal comes with a huge buff to everyone that makes them attack harder.
The problem with 'counterpowers' that are specific like that is that you don't always encounter that power. It's fine if you manage to prepare a scroll of it, but when an entire 33% (for example) of your daily spell alotment is 'counter fire spell' then you run into the problem of 'what happens if I don't encounter fire.'
And the worst part is... it's not going to swing the battle enough to make you wish you had it when the fire appears. A better power would be something more general... that gave bonus saving throws. That power could be used against ongoing damage... or against dominated... or against stunned...
...and that capability exists.
Their presentation of the warrior profession, controlling the battlefield not by any sort of influence on the terrain or enemies, but as a sort of hyper-defender who manages how attacks gets through if they do at all (I think best illustrated when he leaps to intercept an arrow, in essence providing a living damage shield and preempting the need for classical healing). In the case of a wizard, he may be able to summon forth a hurricane wind to deflect projectiles. I'm not saying I know how it could be implemented, but I do know every class, in one of their many iterations, could be made to share the support load. And I hardly think it would step on anyone's toes, but rather inspire some really exciting new party makeups.
This already exists. The powers you need to do this sort of thing exist in every class. Dabbling in support is not some rarity only restricted to the cleric class.
The trick is... to actually write it down on your character sheet. If -your- group doesn't have them, it's because they haven't mastered the trick of actually doing so.
The idea these characters who share in support or diverge from classic tropes will fall into one of two inevitable categories doesn't strike me as believable.
It is not necessary for you to believe it. Strip class from an MMO and give everyone equal access to everything, and you lose focus, and you get either ubermenschen, or non-synergized weaklings.
Look at the design for City of Heroes (which D&D owes a LOT of its inspiration from) for an example of how it caused their first version of the game to be scrapped.
There could be dangers of abuse with a poor design, but the design goal wouldn't be self-sufficiency or a watering down of role, rather new ways of fulfilling the traditional roles, or perhaps new roles entirely.
The former exists, however. Again, look beyond 'astral seal cleric' and you'll find it exists in spades. Were you aware that some clerics have Strength powers? Righteous Brand isn't a heal spell!
And the way Guild Wars 2 actually promotes cross-profession moves is entirely counter to the fears above. How wonderful it would be to for future classes to be able to combine or supplement their powers with other classes' powers. To some extent, that can be achieved with some DM finesse, but I'm sure a set of classes with more interconnected parts would be worth the design.
Guild Wars was always about mixing abilities from two classes into one. But it's also primarily a PvP game. The idea is to take a suite of 8 abilities, and hope you have the right abilities to counter what the enemy brings to the field.
This is not the same thing as a role playing game. While GW can be successful at what it is, its design stepping away from 'the holy trinity' is because it doesn't involve itself with the central mechanic that makes the holy trinity work.
The Holy Trinity is based on the concept of an agro mechanic, threat, and damage reduction. Without agro reduction, or threat, then the holy trinity falls apart because it's entirely based around defeating an AI.
That's why GW2 can afford to remove such a thing, because it was never a part of GW to begin with.
I think Arenanet's work really challenges designers to step back and begin identifying the fundamentals of given classes and class roles. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see future classes changing roles entirely, and having leader and controller fighters or wizards. There's already been some speculation of such in other threads.
1) You have controller wizards. It's what they do.
2) The reason roles exist is because it makes being able to identify what the class is supposed to do quite easily, and makes designing for that class much more coherant. Contrast that with D&D3rd edition, where you had classes with a strong 'This is what you do with it' angle like Fighters, Clerics, Rogues, and Wizards... and then you had classes that made people wonder what it was supposed to do, exactly, like Bards, Dragon Shamans, Marshals. I mean, yeah, they're kinda support... but they're not doing what a cleric does, you kinda need that, screw it, bring the cleric.
Ability to understand what a class is supposed to do simply by reading the word 'controller' or 'leader' is very good at diversifying the game.
Seriously, the game IS diversified a lot more now. Gone are the days of 'You can't be the beguiler, because we actually need a cleric or druid.'
Understandably, D&D is about levels and team work, but I can't understand how any of this design work or potential threatens either of them.
It's not a matter of threatening it, it's a matter of making classes easy to understand (really important, otherwise they don't get played nearly as often) and easy to design for (more important, otherwise you end up with classes that have no sense of purpose, or can't be good at what they can do).
Honestly, it's better for the game if you have four different classes of controllers, each with a clear focus on what they are to do, from top to bottom, but each having many ways of doing that thing, than have a class feel like it's trying to do everything at once but has no focus at all.
Besides, you -can't- do everything at once... you only get one action a round. Might as well be good at that one action.
